THIS is how you slowly build up your characters and world to a satisfying payoff. If you have an entire episode that takes place outside of the main universe and put all the main characters into completely different roles yet still manages to retain the core of the show and give viewers enough familiarity to hold onto, then you really do know how to write. Even if the series ends here, what a brilliant, intelligent, and enjoyable adventure The Orville is. Anyone still out there who looks at this show and thinks "Family Guy in space" is in crippling denial. This show is reaching Stargate levels of storytelling and character development now. What started as a chance foot in the door, to get the fleeting chance to stand in the shadows of science fiction giants has evolved into something that actually has the potential to be one of those giants some day.
For this episode in particular, what a delightful blend of TOS movie and Star Wars musical cues, the new ships and places that are a departure from the typical Union aesthetic, and the very best special effects I've seen on this show so far. Effects that are very detailed and eye-popping while still allowing everything to be well-lit and easy to follow. A very bold and dramatic way to cap off a season, especially the second season, and a very enigmatic ending that deliberately left threads hanging while still being satisfying and positive.
THIS show is the hopeful vision of the future we need right now. Not something that just reflects back what we currently are (because, let's face it, what we currently are is embarrassing), but one that shows up what we could be if we could stop resenting ourselves and each other for five freaking minutes. We'll always have our precious mistakes, our warts, our weirdness, but it's wrong to let those things define us. In the past, this kind of love and awareness came from a different show. A show that has sadly decided to move away from the wisdom of the human adventure. Now, thankfully, it's coming from this one. Hopefully, for a long time to come.
It's sci-fi. I get it and I'm on board...but there was a concern that the ship couldn't handle the pressure of the ocean after having just sat WITHIN the event horizon of a black hole. Sci-fi does best when it bends/breaks rules...but not ignores them. That aside...good ending.
I liked this episode. It was possibly the most Trek-like The Orville has ever been, what with the time-travel angle and all.
Kelly's cleavage was wholly unnecessary, though. When literally every other female character is dressed in "normal" (read: cleavage-covering) clothes, singling Kelly out to wear an unbuttoned tank top the whole time felt awfully fanservice-y.
Holy cleavage Kelly :joy: love it
An interesting direction for the alternate timeline. So many Star Wars vibes from the music and battles. There was even a dash of Alien when they boarded the Orville.
Seeing Alara again was so bittersweet coz we got like 5 minutes with her! So frustrating.
I'm kind of annoyed it all boiled down to romance again in the end. This show is so strong in many respects but there is so much that is romance driven. Usually Ed with his array of hot women. I hope season 3 is a bit more diverse...
Side notes - badass outfits all round but Kelly's cleavage was front and center all the time. It was so unnecessary. Disappointed in the production.
A little bit anticlimactic but still a very strong season finale. Loved the twist that the Orville universe turned from Star Trek to Star Wars due to Kelly's decision not to date Mercer.
the best episode so far.
the alternative timeline worked perfectly
I loved this episode.
It had a cool Starwars feel to it with the battle at Endor and just 'the resistance'. Great to have - you know who - back for a scene. Add some Borg Collective into the mix and... You know. All sci-fi we can think off.
Cool. Loved it.
The Orville went from over-the-top comedy to the best(better) version of Star Trek.
Of course there are some plot holes here and there still, but I'll happily forgive Seth and his crew that, just for the fact alone of delivering such a great fan-series.
Love the fact that all starships buy their seats from the same furniture supplier!
I love alternate timelines! This season has had some great Trek-like elements to it.
[7.2/10] “The Road Not Taken” is a quality piece of craftsmanship. There’s a sturdy story about how one small decision changed the course of the galaxy and a team of familiar heroes in a different guise embarking on a quest to set the timeline right again. It takes them across the universe, fleeing from scores of menacing pursuers and performing grand feats of bravery.
But there’s also no substance to it. It’s a perfectly pleasing empty shell, with little point or purpose beyond the solid but well-worn “for want of a nail” thrust of its narrative. The closest thing to a broader theme or character focus draws back to the same tired, unavailing romance between Mercer and Grayson that the show has been limply presenting since day one. The scenes with the two of them continue to lack chemistry, and the romance has some unfortunate implications.
For one thing, it is once again kind of gross for a showrunner to present an episode where the fate of the galaxy rests on an attractive younger woman deciding to go out with him. Even setting that side, this is another Orville episode that plays up some romcom tropes to no effect. Two seasons in, and Grayson/Mercer hasn’t worked, but I guess it’s what the show’s going with, so we’d better just get used to it.
Otherwise, “The Road Not Taken” is just set piece after set piece. Mercer and Malloy outrun the Kaylon in a shuttle. A meetup with the rest of the crew and a mission to recover a vital protein leads to another Kaylon attack and escape. They then have to dive to the bottom of the Marian Trench to board the Orville, only to then have to raise it from the depths. Finally, it’s a race against time to channel enough power to the time machine to send Dr. Finn back to save the day before the ship blows up.
It’s all done quite well, especially on a T.V. budget. Ships fly through moons and icy cliffs. Underwater pressure makes survival a tense affair. The usual race against time and post-apocalyptic sense to the whole mission adds flavor to everything. This is definitely The Orville going for big spectacle, and it largely works on those terms. It’s just more plot-driven than character- or idea-driven, which makes it less compelling for the Trekkie audience the show’s been courting.
It’s a “get the one plot thing, so we can do the next plot thing, before we accomplish the most important plot thing” type of installment. Again, it works on those terms, with a propulsive type of cause and effect at play (albeit one that requires a fair amount of contrivance), but it lacks the deeper weight or thoughtfulness that the best episodes of the show can offer.
That said, whatever my discomfort with the safety of the universe depending on whether someone will go out with Seth MacFarlane, I do appreciate the show’s timeline logic there. If Kelly doesn’t go on a second date with Ed, they never get married, she never cheats, she never puts in a good word to get him his own ship out of guilt, he’s not on the Orville when the Union goes to the Kaylon homeworld, and the alternate universe crew can’t stop the invasion. That’s sound reasoning at least.
I also appreciate that it picks up on the continuity of the prior episode. The notion that our heroes did in fact mess up the timeline by sending Past Kelly back in time, and this is the result, makes for a cool follow-up. Granted, you can’t think about the time travel cause and effect for more than about two minutes before the logic there falls apart, but it’s a solid setup and Dr. Finn needing a special protein to go back and time and finish the job is a good story-motivator.
That’s the thing. This episode isn’t bad at all. It services the whole cast, more or less, with a grace note for Yaphet and a welcome cameo from Lt. Kitan, back in action. It can coast on the coolness of seeing grittier, alternate universe versions of our heroes in status quo-shifted situations. And the show goes all out in terms of action and spectacle, coming off more like Star Wars in tone than Star Trek.
But there’s just not much below the surface, aside from the same unconvincing romance this series has been slinging since it started. That makes it a little disappointing as a season finale.
And with that, I am caught up on The Orville. I’ve found it’s easiest to swallow if you think of it as a spiritual successor to Star Trek: Enterprise rather than a descendent of The Next Generation. It has many of the same problems as that show (which makes sense given the common writing staff), like a Captain portrayed as a worthy leader even when he does terrible unlikable things, especially when he’s mired in a weak but nevertheless ongoing romance. Also like Enterprise, the show enjoys its most creative success when its showrunner isn’t, well, writing the show.
But sometimes, The Orville a dose of classic Trek, and those episodes are truly phenomenal. It’s no coincidence that they tend to focus on secondary characters and leave behind the tepid humor and romcom schtick that tend to sink Mercer-focused episodes. This show is basically Seth MacFarlane’s TNG cover band, and yet it works best when it strips away his calling cards and just does its best impression of Picard and the gang.
That doesn’t speak well of the show’s chances for greater creative achievements in the seasons to come, but hey, TNG didn’t find its firm footing until season 3 anyway. Season 2 made some improvements, and if Seth shows up next year with a beard, maybe there’s reason to hope.
I'm a sucker for an alternate reality/timeline episode, and this one was pretty good overall. I did facepalm rather hard though when they needed to hide from some Kaylons. So they took the ship just inside the event horizon of a black hole. Because the Kaylons wouldn't be able to see them since light can't escape from said event horizon. That has got to be one of the stupidest sci-fi plot devices I've ever seen. What makes it worse is that in the previous episode they used a similar tactic to get out of a similar situation, but that one was believable.
This show keeps getting better with each episode.
As usual when dumbass unintelligent writers starts to mess with time because they are too stupid to create a real story it turns into a illogical and paradoxical mess.
Filler episode derived from the previous one, but which gives you joy to see how the characters have evolved. Those scenes and music tribute to the Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek 1
A Star Wars feelings for this finale. Well done. Call me to change the timeline I will agree more fast than then.
Talk about a butterfly-effect. But I like it.It basically comes down to the fact that even the worst day of your live might held something good in it moving forward.
Althought the ending was probably never in doubt there is real tension and emotional drama. MacFarlane and his crew really build up something great here over the course of the two seasons. The musical score in this episode was Emmy worthy if you'd asked me and I had a huge smile on my face seeing Halston Sage again. Her leaving is probably the only stain on a great follow up season. Now let's hope we haven't seen the last of The Orville.
Two great two parter episodes in one year. We definitely need a season 3.
This was a good capstone to a season that was well written and performed. Each season is more impressive. The storyline made sence too. It wasn't as if it was a discovery of conveluded ways to make bad science believable or gerrymandering a broken web of characters and stories that just ends up being shoved into the darkness, never to be spoken of again.
Nope. It wasn't that (thank heaven).
As with the first part of this story, this episode was 70% good, 30% WTF - and I don't mean "Wireless Telecommunications Facility" :nerd::face_with_raised_eyebrow::laughing: The Kaylons, who have "far superior intelligence" and technology, were - with three attack units - unable to get a direct hit on two 'biologicals' who are running across challenging terrain whilst carrying a large, heavy piece of machinery. Why even attempt to hit them at all, when a simple scan of the planet surface would have revealed the location of the shuttle, allowing them to target that instead and destroy it with ease, then send individual soldiers down to eliminate the survivors? Again, when they're attempting to shoot down one single Union shuttle, multiple Kaylon ships are unable to make a single meaningful shot strike home before the shuttle reached the "piece of junk" mothership. Why did their advanced intelligence not even consider ignoring the shuttle altogether, but instead destroy the scavenger vessel before the shuttle was even anywhere near it? The shuttle represented no direct threat, so it would surely have been good tactical logic to eliminate the larger, more powerful ship first. Once the shuttle was inside the junkship, why not just concentrate all firepower from multiple vessels to ensure its destruction? How did they not work out, with their collective genius, how the junkship had 'escaped' into the black hole without being destroyed? Although they eventually must have decided that it WAS destroyed, because they gave up searching for it. How did the Orville end up seven miles beneath the ocean when it was in perfect working order, with no exterior signs of any sort of battle, and still with full power available? Why were the Finn family not seated or secured in any way, at any point, whilst they were aboard the shuttle, despite it twisting and turning to avoid attack from the Kaylons, then plunging into the ocean at high speed? They were just standing like they were on a public service bus waiting for the next stop. Why was LaMarr ever chief engineer of the Orville in the corrupted timeline when neither Mercer nor Grayson - who were instrumental in pushing him to be more than just a co-pilot or whatever he was in the original timeline - had never been aboard the Orville in their lives?
When I said at the end of my review of the first part of this season finale that it threw "all manner of questions/possibilities into the air regarding the timeline", I really did not mean the creation of a timeline that was so inconsistent and illogical that it brought about all of the above questions/scenarios. It would have been nice to learn a little more about about the history of the seven years since the divergence from the original timeline, although everything directly relevant to the plot did get at least a cursory explanation.
All of the above notwithstanding, 'The Road Not Taken' was a very high-octane, tense viewing experience with a very strong Trek/Wars vibe, which was fantastic. The 'butterfly effect' theme was woven artfully into the plot, despite the annoying Mercer/Grayson romance roots. Superficially, a fine quality way to sign off the second season of The Orville.
I am really glad they delivered on the cliffhanger from the last episode and didn't simply have that as an alternative timeline that is never to be seen again.
Which is even better because I really like what-if-scenarios. I also actually liked that somehow "Star Trek" becomes "Star Wars" when all goes to hell.
The episode started of great and had a lot of suspense but in the end there just wasn't enough of the butterfly effect. And they had such a great start. Just when I was thinking how convenient it is that the crew in this timeline had the new chief of security from the beginning they inserted that Halston Sage cameo. But aside from that everything else was pretty mindless writing and unconvincing. Why did John also become an engineer although the two people encouraging him never were on The Orville in this timeline and Gordon wasn't the pilot that made it okay for him to leave the cockpit? And so on. I don't even want to talk about the romance between Ed and Kelly.
What also struck me was how cheap most of the VFX and CG were. They showed what level they can achieve in previous episodes but here they looked so outdated or like they had just stopped working on them halfway through.
Aside from that I liked the gritty postapocalyptic style.
The "piece of junk" ship can survive and escape a black hole ok, whatever… but the Kaylon seem to know they're in there, why wouldn't they just wait, especially more than a couple days? They're robots and there are a lot of them… they don't get tired or bored. They would also know about time dilation.
So then they go down into the ocean and they all go in the shuttle… even the kids. No one is manning the big ship in orbit? Don't they need to make sure no one destroys or steals that ship in case the Orville can't take off? Doesn't really make sense that the Orville is actually still so intact but whatever. Lucky them.
so it seem due to fox hasn't decided to extend the series, this episode released as finalle.
Shout by TalgeezeBlockedParent2019-04-26T15:25:32Z
The ship crashed at the bottom of the ocean but thank God every single bottle in the bar is intact.